On Computers: You need a calculator app to figure your data bill

When you talk to a cellphone sales rep, you’ll hear lots of words about data plans, all sold by the number of megabytes you use per month on your hand-held device.

Jim Hillibish

When you talk to a cellphone sales rep, you’ll hear lots of words about data plans, all sold by the number of megabytes you use per month on your hand-held device.

This is something of a shock to us. Data use on the old wired Net is transparent to us. Almost all access the plans under plans for laptop and desktop computers offer unlimited megabytes of data. We don’t worry about it.

New pricing schemes in the works will change the way you surf the Web. Basically, they reward frugal users and nail to the wall the power hogs.

On the plus side, they will give you an idea of the cost of each service provided by your phone or tablet. Downside is data will cost more money.

Higher costs are necessary, say the providers. The old Internet wire access is broadband based. It’s easy to add more capacity, and higher data delivery, by hooking up new servers.

Wireless is much more expensive, requiring towers and broadcast facilities. But the main choke point is the limited radio spectrum. There’s not enough airway space to fuel demand, resulting in slow connections in larger cities.

Charging per wireless data megabyte is the difference between riding in your own car or in a taxi. The meter will be always running on wireless.

In choosing a plan, we first need to know how much data we use. That’s a daunting chore for everybody, as we need data to feed a number of different applications, all using different amounts.

And then there’s the apps themselves. The data demands of all that neat stuff are increasing exponentially. There’s more graphics, more sound, more videos. Websites constantly add video and increase the size of their photos. That quickly doubles the consumer data consumption of viewing the site.

Hand-held apps too often are programmed to be data rich. Some would call them hogs.

One would expect the next app hit will meter all the data coming into your device and warn you when limits are exceeded. We need help here.